Category: Stuff

There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it!

There’s loads of stuff going on around Ada Lovelace Day this year. We have events in London and worldwide (Copenhagen, Dresden and Montreal, with the promise of others to come). The London Potluck Unconference, to be held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, 6.00pm onwards, still has some places left, so please nab yours now, whilst you can.

We have T-shirts on their way – we’re just polishing off the design and hope to get them up and ready for you to buy very soon. We also now have an Offers page which currently carries a 10% discount from the lovely people at AdaFruit Industries. Again, we hope to have more there for you soon!

If you’d like to get involved, then our main need at the moment is promotion. We need to get more people signed up, and here’s how you can help:

I’m excited to say that I have been asked to write on Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise blog. I’ll be covering all aspects of social technology in business, whether behind the firewall or out there in the world wild web: tools, techniques, interviews with the people who make all this stuff happen and anything else I can think of.

Now that might sound an awful lot like what I do here on Strange Attractor, but I think what will happen is that I’ll end up talking about the other bits of social media here. So there’ll be more of a media and journalism focus here, more of an enterprise focus there.

It’s not often I toot my own horn, but I’m going to let myself do so on this occasion. I usually find self-congratulation quite difficult as I am haunted by the feeling that I Should Have Done More, but it is nice to occasionally have a little recognition from someone else. I’m thus quite chuffed to be listed at No. 50 in the Telegraph’s list of The 50 Most Influential Britons in Technology.

I’m on the list, apparently, because of Ada Lovelace Day – the international day of blogging about women in technology that I organised earlier this year. There are only five women in the Telegraph’s lower 25, listed yesterday. I can’t help thinking that’s slightly ironic, not to mention another indicator that we have long way to go before Ada Lovelace Day becomes unnecessary.

I can’t deny that it’s nice to be recognised. I remember feeling equally chuffed when, years ago, The Guardian added Strange Attractor to its list of essential blogs. We still sometimes even get traffic from that archival page! But I also think it would have been nice to have been recognised for some of the meatier work I’ve done, such as being a social media pioneer or founding the Open Rights Group.

Of course, lists are always subjective and there are plenty of “Eh?” moments with this one. Baroness Greenfield is someone I think is hideously misguided, not to mention often flat-out wrong and whilst she may be influential it is entirely the wrong sort of influence. The majority people included come from ter intarwebz, with only the aforementioned Greenfield (“scientist”), Tanya Byron and James Dyson working in other fields.

I hope that today’s second part includes more people from other areas of technology. Nanotech, biotech, electronic engineering, software, games – none of these areas are represented. I suppose it could be argued that influence these days relies on having a hefty presence on the web and that because this is a list of influencers the web is going to be over-represented.

There’s also the perennial argument of “Why do a list anyway? They’re just a waste of time.” That’s a view I often sympathise with, but I have to admit there are a lot of people on this list I’ve never heard of, just as I’m sure the vast majority of readers will not have heard of me. Wouldn’t it be nice if this list was titled Interesting People You Might Not Have Heard Of, because that would have been both more useful and more honest.

Still, I shall enjoy my little moment of pride in what I have achieved. … Right, done! Now to get on with Doing More!

I’m not sure how long they’ve been there (Kev and I rely on the Corante team for blog tech development), but I’ve just noticed that Kev and I now have our own RSS feeds! So if you want to follow just one of us, or to have our feeds separate in your RSS reader, you now can:

Yesterday afternoon, Strange Attractor migrated from using a very old installation of Movable Type to using a shiny new version of WordPress. We’re very happy and excited that this has happened as it’s going to give us a lot more flexibility in the long run to install plug-ins and do cool things.

You might notice that things have subtly changed, e.g. there’s no preview button on the comments now, but hopefully you’ll find the site quicker to load, easier to comment on, and generally better in other ways that we haven’t quite figured out yet. The site may change more over coming weeks as we tinker with it. (The very fact that we can tinker with it makes Kevin and I very happy!)

Thanks to Hylton Joliffe and the team at Corante for making the transition so smooth!

I can’t believe that Suw is letting me drag her out walking again, but she has. Last year, she let me drag her up a mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park. This year, we’re off for the next week to hike Offa’s Dyke Naitonal Trail in the Welsh marches, the area along the Welsh-English border. It’s much more mellow and some lovely B&B’s along the way, but it’s still a 70-mile walk.
Suw is taking her iPhone, and I’m taking my Nokia N82, mostly because it’s the lightest 5-megapixel camera we have. Apart from that, it’s a technology-free, blogging-free week. We’ll see in week, hopefully rested and relaxed.

I’m usually rubbish at pimping myself, but I spent a couple of hours yesterday online, writing up answers to Dave Witzel’s questions over at Live Interviews Online. It was fun to talk about what I do for a living, how I got into speaking Welsh, and to just start to tickle around the edges of ideas about business culture that I’ve been having lately. Even if I do say so myself, the interview has come out rather well, so do pop over and take a look!

Well actually, it’s the only Strange Attractor wedding! Kevin and I are getting married in February, and at last we’ve managed to get almost all the invitations out (although a few are still stuck here, with no addresses – for shame!). As we’d expect from our friends, so far we’ve had responses via IM and this one, via Seesmic. Thank you Lloyd!

You’ll forgive us (well, me, really, as Kev’s still writing prolifically), if blogging is a little lighter than usual in the run up to the Big Day.

Despite the guys at Corante making some good advances in fixing our blog, we’re still having a few uncooperative moments from the MT installation. Sometimes Strange is here, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes you can comment, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes we can get in to the admin pages, sometimes we can’t. At least now I don’t have to connect via my mobile phone to access the admin pages! All I can say is please bear with us and with Corante. They’re working as hard as they can to fix things!